My immediate goal is to determine why glucose sometimes acts to stimulate appetite and, at other times, is satiating. My long-term career objectives are to conduct experiments that will help to elucidate the processes underlying obesity, bulimia, and anorexia nervosa. My focus is on dietary control of food intake and body weight, and it is of special interest to understand how clinical problems with appetite and weight control are related to dietary factors. An RCDA would enhance my development by providing me with the opportunity to get training in nutrition and to get direct clinical experience. This, in turn, would help to further develop my ability to formulate basic research questions that would have greater clinical relevance. Thus, an RCDA would allow me to obtain knowledge that would enhance my ability to make significant contributions to solving the problems of eating disorders and weight control. An RCDA also would provide me with considerably more time to conduct my research and, thus, develop my own research program. UCLA is committed to my development and intends for me to be an integral part of its research program. If an award is made, I will have the opportunity to conduct both basic and clinical research in the Division of Clinical Nutrition with scholars in clinical nutrition, dietetics, behavioral medicine, and biochemistry. This multidisciplinary laboratory has extensive, high-quality research facilities in which I could test the clinical relevance of the results of my studies on rabbits that I an conducting in the Psychology Department. In ny rabbit studies, I am testing free-feeding and meal-feeding (food available for restricted periods) rabbits to determine how patterns of meal- taking behavior act to determine whether glucose is satiating or hunger stimulating. It is also the intent to determine the metabolic and hormonal mechanisms that mediate these behavioral effects. In addition to measuring meal-patterning parameters (e.g., meal size, meal frequency, feeding rate), I will also evaluate the relative roles of carbohydrate and lipid metabolism and insulin in mediating the feeding effects.